Klaipėda Region

• 1. Introduction

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  On the morning of the 23rd of March 1939, Adolf Hitler sailed into Memel to celebrate the Klaipėda Region's return to German sovereignty. He arrived aboard a Kriegsmarine naval ship as dawn broke over the Baltic port. For Hitler, it was the last in a series of bloodless recoveries of land stripped from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. For the people waiting on the docks, the moment was far more complicated.

  Just five years before Hitler's arrival, Lithuania had put local leaders of pro-Nazi organizations on trial in Kaunas. The 1934-1935 trial of two men named Neumann and Sass is considered by many the first anti-Nazi trial in Europe. Three members of those organizations were sentenced to death. After political and economic pressure from Germany, most of those imprisoned were eventually released. How had a small Baltic port become simultaneously a stage for early anti-Nazi resistance and a territory that welcomed German annexation? The answer stretches back to 1226. That year, Duke Konrad I of Masovia appealed for outside forces to help him subdue the Baltic tribes living along these shores.

• 2. A Castle and a Border

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  In March 1226, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II issued the Golden Bull of Rimini. The document granted the Teutonic Knights ownership of lands seized beyond Masovia's borders. In exchange, the Order would protect Masovia from raids by the Baltic tribes. The Skalvians, who lived along the Neman River, and neighboring Baltic peoples resisted for decades. The Baltic peoples rose up repeatedly between 1242 and 1274, but the Order was not stopped. After overrunning the Nadruvians and Yotvingians as well, the Knights extended their hold northward along the coast.

  In 1252, the Teutonic Order built Memel Castle at the point where the Dangė river meets the Neman. The site sat at the northern end of the Curonian Spit and commanded both the river mouth and the inland trade routes. The castle gave the Order a permanent foothold on the coast.

  In 1422, the Order and the Polish-Lithuanian union defined their border with the Treaty of Melno. Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania had pressed for the full length of the Neman to serve as the boundary. The treaty instead placed the line north of Memelberg and drew it southeasterly toward the river. That border held for nearly five centuries.

  After the 1422 treaty, many Lithuanians returned to settle in northeastern Prussia. By the sixteenth century, this part of the region had acquired the name Lithuania Minor. Its inhabitants were shaped by both German and Lithuanian culture. That layered identity, centuries in the making, would face its first great crisis in 1918. Germany's collapse brought the victorious powers to Paris, ready to redraw Europe's map.

• 3. The Diplomats' Bargain

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  In 1918, as German forces evacuated the region, a small group of pro-Lithuanian Prussian Lithuanians signed the Act of Tilsit. The document demanded the unification of Prussian Lithuania with Lithuania proper. Lithuanians have traditionally viewed it as expressing the will of Lithuania Minor. But the majority of Prussian Lithuanians did not want to join Lithuania. Prussian Lithuanians made up 26.6% of the region's population and were themselves divided on the question.

  At the Paris Peace Conference, Poland's Roman Dmowski argued for transferring the lower Neman River and its delta to Lithuania. He was acting on the orders of Józef Piłsudski. The plan reached further: giving Lithuania a sea outlet was a step toward incorporating Lithuania into Poland. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau supported the plan.

  The German delegation at the Peace Conference, led by Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, filed a formal objection on the 9th of May 1919. Brockdorff-Rantzau argued that even Lithuanian speakers in the territory had never desired separation from Germany. He described them as "a loyal constituent part of the German community" and called Memel "an entirely German town." The Allied Powers replied that the district "has always been Lithuanian" in population and speech. They argued that Memel's German character was "no justification for maintaining the district under German sovereignty." One practical point settled the matter: Memel's port was, in their words, "the only sea outlet for Lithuania."

  French troops arrived to administer the territory on the 15th of February 1920, under General Dominique Odry. The Lithuanian population accused the French of siding too closely with the pro-German Landes Directorium. Odry soon left his post and was replaced by Gabriel Jean Petisné, who headed the civilian administration from 1921. During this period, an organization called the Deutsch-Litauischer Heimatbund attracted 30,000 members, roughly 21% of the total population, drawn from both ethnic Germans and Lithuanians. They lobbied for an independent Freistaat Memelland that would eventually rejoin Germany. By the start of 1923, three years had passed since the Versailles Treaty had taken effect, and the territory's status remained unresolved.

• 4. The Revolt and Its Price

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  On the 9th of January 1923, Lithuanian militias entered the Klaipėda Region and seized control of the territory. The French had recently committed their forces to the Occupation of the Ruhr in Germany. Their administration in Memel took no significant counteractive measures against the rebels. Ten days later, on the 19th of January, Lithuania formally annexed the region. The Conference of Ambassadors recognized the fait accompli in 1924.

  At the Klaipėda Convention, Lithuania agreed to grant the region a separate parliament and two official languages. The territory retained the right to raise its own taxes, charge customs duties, and manage its cultural and religious affairs. It also received a separate judicial system, separate citizenship, internal control of agriculture and forestry, and its own social security system. On the 8th of May 1924, a further Convention signed in Paris sealed the terms.

  Memel's port gave Lithuania something it had long lacked: a year-round, ice-free outlet to the Baltic Sea. Lithuania invested heavily in Klaipėda's port infrastructure, modernizing and adapting it primarily to handle agricultural exports. Port reconstruction became one of the largest investment projects the Lithuanian government undertook in the interwar period. On the 29th of January 1928, Lithuania and the Weimar Republic signed an arbitration agreement. Both governments described it as "a sign of the friendly nature of their relations." The inhabitants of the territory had never been given a plebiscite on whether to join Lithuania or Germany.

• 5. Three Names, One Shore

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  The Lithuanian census of 1925 counted 141,000 inhabitants in the Klaipėda Region and sorted them by declared language. Forty-three and a half percent called themselves German, 27.6% identified as Lithuanian, and 25.2% chose neither label but called themselves Klaipėdan. That third category captured something the two-language framework could not: a regional identity shaped by centuries of overlap. Other sources placed the Memeländisch share at 27.1%, Germans at 41.9%, and Lithuanians at 26.6%. Whichever set of figures one used, the picture was the same.

  In Klaipėda city itself, Lithuanian speakers made up 21.5% of the population in 1912. By 1925 that share had risen to 32.6%, and by 1932 to 38.7%. The shift was driven partly by urbanization and partly by migration from Lithuania proper. Prussian Lithuanians were more rural than their German neighbors. Lithuanian speakers were more concentrated in the northern districts of Klaipėdos and Šilutės than in the south.

  About 95% of the territory's inhabitants were Lutheran. Across the border, more than 90% of Greater Lithuanians were Catholic. On the 23rd of July 1925, an agreement formally separated the region's Lutheran congregations from the Old Prussian Ecclesiastical Province of East Prussia. The Klaipėda congregations were organized into the Regional Synodal Federation of the Memel Territory. A consistory was established in Klaipėda in 1927, first under a superintendent named F. Gregor. O. Obereiniger succeeded him after an election by the regional synod in 1933. On the Catholic side, the region's parishes had belonged to the Bishopric of Ermland until 1926. That year, they were reorganized into the new Territorial Prelature of Klaipėda, under Prelate Justinas Staugaitis.

  After Antanas Smetona's December 1926 coup, the Memel Territory became an anomaly within Lithuania. It was the only place in the country where civil marriage was legally recognized. Elsewhere, only church ceremonies had legal standing. Lithuanian intelligentsia regularly traveled to Klaipėda to marry, and opponents of Smetona's regime used the territory as a base.

  Smetona's government pursued Lithuanisation aggressively, dismissing German teachers, officials, and priests. Both Germans and Prussian Lithuanians were blocked from state service positions in the territory; officials sent from Kaunas replaced them. The number of newcomers from Lithuania rose from 5,000 in 1926 to 30,000 by 1939. By the 1938 election, the unified German list captured 87.2% of the local parliament vote. In the 1930s, a local author named Ieva Simonaitytė published a novel called "Aukštujų Šimonių likimas," meaning "The Fate of Šimoniai from Aukštujai." The novel, rooted in family history, traced the centuries of German-Lithuanian encounter on this coast. By late 1938, Lithuania acknowledged it had lost effective control of the territory.

• 6. The Transfer

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  An oral ultimatum from Germany sent the Lithuanian foreign minister, Juozas Urbšys, to Berlin in early 1939. Urbšys and his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the Treaty of the Cession of the Memel Territory in the pre-dawn hours. In exchange, Lithuania was granted a free zone in the port of Memel for 99 years, using facilities built during the occupation period. German forces occupied the territory even before Lithuania's Seimas formally ratified the treaty. The Seimas approved it in the hope that Germany would press no further territorial demands on Lithuania. The United Kingdom and France took no action.

  Of the 303 people who applied for Lithuanian citizenship under the treaty's terms, only 20 requests were granted. Counting family members, the number who had applied came to 585. About 8,900 Lithuanians who had settled during the occupation period emigrated after the transfer. Germany also expelled about 1,300 Jews from Memel and Lithuania, along with about 40 Prussian Lithuanians. For most of the remaining inhabitants, Germans and Memellanders alike, the reunion with Germany was welcome.

  German forces turned Memel into a fortified naval base almost immediately. Within six years, it would become a besieged city.

• 7. The City of Six

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  By October 1944, the inhabitants of the region, regardless of ethnic background, faced a choice: stay or evacuate before the Red Army. Nearly all chose to leave. The German Army held the city during the Battle of Memel, fighting until the 28th of January 1945. When Soviet forces finally entered after the surrender, only six people were found in the city.

  In 1945 and 1946, about 35,000 local inhabitants, Prussian Lithuanians and Germans, remained in the region. The government of the Lithuanian SSR sent agents into displaced persons camps with promises that former inhabitants could return and have their property restored. From 1945 to 1950, about 8,000 people were repatriated. Those who returned and spoke both Lithuanian and German were classified as Germans by the authorities. In 1951, the Lithuanian SSR expelled a further 3,500 people to East Germany. Families of local Lithuanians who had opposed German parties before the war were deported to Siberia.

  In 1958, when emigration became possible, the majority of the surviving population left for West Germany. The Lithuanian SSR described this as a repatriation of Germans, though many of those who emigrated were Prussian Lithuanians. People who remained were dismissed from their jobs.

  Today, those formerly Lutheran territories are mostly inhabited by Lithuanians who are Catholic and by Orthodox Russians. A few thousand Prussian Lithuanian Protestants remain. The Federal Republic of Germany considers them German citizens, which continues to facilitate their emigration. No property was ever restored to pre-1945 owners. When Lithuania declared independence on the 11th of March 1990, it chose not to restore autonomy to the former Memel Territory.